by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
Don’t Wait Until You’re On Your Deathbed to Start Getting REAL With Yourself and Life
This article is just a gentle reminder that you’re going to be dead one day (but don’t let that put you off – in fact, if you really accept it, it might be the thing that finally allows you to live):
Most people spend their lives acting as though death is some administrative inconvenience that only happens to other people and so we avoid talking about it, thinking about it, and feeling it by distracting ourselves with noise, routines, scrolling, drama, and endless little ego games because somewhere deep down we think we can psychologically outrun the truth.
Spoiler: we can’t.
One day, your body will stop working, your possessions will either be taken to the dump or end up belonging to somebody else, and people will tell stories about you in the past tense. Your unfinished business will stay unfinished. The emails won’t matter. The social performances will have all ended and the fake version of yourself you created to please everybody else will no longer be able to hold you back from yourself.
Strangely enough, this is all exactly why life is so precious:
Death and life are two sides of the same coin and so if you don’t accept death, then you can’t fully live a real life because you’ll spend your whole existence resisting reality instead of participating in it.
If you wanna live your real life, then, you have to see clearly and clarity starts with accepting the obvious:
You are temporary.
So am I.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
Don't Wait For Your Deathbed: What We'll Cover In This Article
- Don’t Wait Until You’re On Your Deathbed to Start Getting REAL With Yourself and Life
- The Day Death Stopped Being Abstract
- Change Is Inevitable
- Time Is Precious Because It’s Limited
- Friction vs Flow
- The Regret Nobody Wants
- Say YES to What’s Real and NO to What’s Unreal
- A Practical Way to Wake Yourself Up
- The Final Word: Stop Negotiating With Unreality and Really LIVE Before You’re On Your Deathbed
The Day Death Stopped Being Abstract
I actually died twice on an operating table after a failed kidney transplant so I feel at least somewhat qualified to talk about this topic.
Honestly, though, any human being is qualified because death is the one thing that applies to all of us equally whether you’re a billionaire, monk, celebrity, bin man, influencer, accountant, saint, sinner, or anything in between – we’re all heading towards the same exit eventually.
After the experience of the kidney transplant ‘stuff’, I could’ve told myself some grand sweeping story about destiny or purpose or why I was “chosen” to survive, but the truth is much simpler than that:
It showed me that life is a gift.
That’s literally it.
I don’t mean this in the cheesy ‘motivational poster’ sense either – I mean it as genuinely as one can mean something as an embodied truth:
The fact that any of us get to wake up at all is absurdly miraculous when you think about it.
You get mornings.
You get conversations.
You get music.
You get laughter.
You get heartbreak.
You get another chance to become more REAL.
At one stage, when I was reading loads of Marcus Aurelius and other Stoic philosophers, I’d literally jump out of bed in the morning because I knew time was limited.
There was an urgency to my life and a kind of sharpness or sense that every day mattered because every day was disappearing forever.
This put me in a bit of a flow state but even I’ve mellowed a bit since then I still carry two lessons with me every single day:
- Change is inevitable.
- Time is precious.
If you truly accept those two things too then your life can change for real.
Change Is Inevitable
Death shows us that change is unavoidable because we know it’s coming and so everything is moving and constantly transforming.
Nothing stays the same:
Your body changes, relationships change, cultures change, seasons change, emotions change, identities change – your entire life is flowing somewhere whether you cooperate with reality or not.
The ego hates this because the ego is built on the illusion of stasis (the idea that nothing changes).
This is why the ego wants control, permanence, and predictability – it wants to freeze reality into a fixed shape so it can feel safe.
This is why people cling to dead relationships, outdated identities, old wounds, social masks, and familiar suffering.
Reality as we experience it keeps moving anyway, though (even though what’s real is always real), and the more you resist this movement because you’re trying to cling to your ego, the more friction you experience.
A lot of unnecessary suffering simply comes from trying to stop life from being life.
People say they want freedom, but what they often really want is reassurance that nothing will ever change but the ‘bad’ news is that everything changes.
Thankfully, the ‘good’ news is also the same thing:
Everything changes.
Once you accept this change as part of life (instead of resisting it), you can start moving with reality instead of fighting it which means you’ll be able to let go more easily and can stop trying to force dead things to stay alive.
When you become more fluid like this, you become more adaptive, which makes you more REAL:
Acceptance of things as they are doesn’t mean becoming passive or weak – it means seeing clearly enough to respond intelligently instead of panicking because reality refused to obey your preferences.
That’s trust.
Time Is Precious Because It’s Limited
Death also teaches us that our time, energy, and attention are precious because they’re limited.
If something is infinite, it loses urgency, but (more ‘good’ news) your life isn’t infinite:
You only get so many mornings.
So many conversations with your parents, so many chances to say “I love you”, so many walks outside, so many ideas to act on, so many opportunities to become who you really are.
Once you truly accept this, you stop wasting yourself so casually – you become more intentional and stop flinging your attention into black holes that drain your soul.
If we’re honest, most of us have wasted massive chunks of our lives resisting reality instead of actually living…think about all the things you’ve probably burned years on:
- Worrying
- F.E.A.R (“False Evidence Appearing Real”)
- Toxic relationships
- Pointless drama
- Trying to impress people you don’t even like
- Staying small so others feel comfortable
- Doomscrolling
- Pretending
- Procrastinating
- Clinging to identities that no longer fit
- Waiting for permission to be yourself
- Etc. etc. etc.
At the root of all of it is resistance to reality in the form of resistance to change, resistance to truth, resistance to growth, resistance to feeling, resistance to letting go, and resistance creates friction.
A good first step to overcoming the resistance to life is to start embracing the fact that it’s all going to end one day.
Friction vs Flow
A useful thing to know is that friction and flow are both feedback about your relationship with yourself and reality:
If your whole life feels heavy, forced, and constantly blocked, there’s a good chance you’re resisting something important – this doesn’t mean life should feel ‘easy’ all the time because growth can be uncomfortable, grief can hurt, and truth can and will dismantle you before it rebuilds you.
There’s a difference between meaningful challenge and soul-destroying resistance, though, and what’s true is that when you’re aligned with reality, there’s flow even inside difficulty but, when you’re resisting reality, even simple things become exhausting.
Flow comes from being aligned with truth and wholeness but friction comes from bullshit and fragmentation:
A fragmented person says “yes” when they mean “no”; they stay in situations that betray their essence, live according to social expectations instead of truth, ignore their intuition, waste years negotiating with unreality.
Eventually life starts screaming through symptoms like anxiety, burnout, numbness, resentment, compulsions, depression, and disconnection – not because life is punishing them but because reality is trying to wake them up.
The Regret Nobody Wants
There’s a famous book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying written by Bronnie Ware who worked in palliative care.
What she discovered is that the number one regret people expressed before death was this:
They wished they’d had the courage to live true to themselves instead of according to the expectations of others.
Think about that for a second and then ask yourself how it applies to your own life.
What it shows us is that, at the end of life, people aren’t usually devastated that they didn’t answer more emails or spend more time curating an online persona – they regret abandoning themselves and being UNREAL.
Maybe part of you already feels that regret now?
Maybe you already know there’s a more REAL version of yourself trying to emerge underneath all the conditioning, fear, and performance.
If so, then, good because that awareness is a gift.
Reflecting on death can jolt you back to life – not because death is morbid but because it cuts through illusion with terrifying efficiency.
It forces the question:
“What actually matters?”
If you sit with that question honestly, your priorities start rearranging themselves, and you can actually go start doing something real that you care about.
Say YES to What’s Real and NO to What’s Unreal
If you want to live more truthfully, you need to start saying YES to the real stuff:
This means reconnecting with your essence (your REALNESS) and expressing it through REAL ACTION (the highest form of expression in life).
This isn’t just about thinking about authenticity but about actually LIVING it by speaking more honestly, creating things that matter to you, having difficult conversations, taking risks, following curiosity, trusting your (actual) intuition more, and allowing yourself to change.
On the other side of the coin and just as equally important is that you need to start saying NO to the unreal stuff.
The fake obligations, the performative relationships, the endless ego games, the roles you’ve outgrown, or the environments that slowly suffocate your spirit – start shifting away from all of this ‘stuff’ (or, at least, mentally committing to doing so if you can’t make a move right now).
As the sacred mantra goes:
“Gimme something real or GTFO.”
Don’t wait until the end of your life to tell people how you really feel – tell them to f off now…politely if possible but firmly if necessary.
The point isn’t aggression but honesty – your life force is too precious to keep leaking it into unreality.
If you want to go deeper into real life and flow then check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.
A Practical Way to Wake Yourself Up
Here’s a somatic exercise that can help you embody this stuff instead of just intellectually agreeing with it (assuming that you do!):
Set a timer for five minutes, then find a comfortable position, put one hand on your belly and one hand on your heart, and start breathing with gentle ujjayi breathing (slow, conscious breaths with a soft oceanic sound in the throat – it’s kinda like your fogging a window or mirror with your mouth but you keep it closed and breathe only through your nose).
Let your nervous system settle so you can create a feeling of safety inside yourself first and then then slowly bring up the reality that one day your life will be over.
Not in a dramatic or catastrophic way – just feel it in truth and notice what comes up for you (fear, sadness, resistance, gratitude, relief, clarity – whatever).
Stay with it.
The goal isn’t to terrify yourself but to become familiar with reality so you can stop wasting energy running from it – what you’ll find if you keep doing this exercise is that, paradoxically, accepting death often creates more aliveness.
You wake up.
Colours seem brighter.
Conversations feel more meaningful.
Your intuition becomes louder.
You stop postponing your REAL life.
The Final Word: Stop Negotiating With Unreality and Really LIVE Before You’re On Your Deathbed
At the end of the day, embracing death isn’t about becoming obsessed with dying – it’s about finally becoming available for living…REAL living.
We’re not talking about the socially approved imitation version of life where you spend decades suppressing yourself to maintain comfort and approval but just a life of truth and flow.
This kind of real living requires courage because reality keeps changing and because your time here is limited but those same truths are also what make life beautiful.
Stop negotiating with things that make your soul feel dead:
Say what you need to say.
Create what you need to create.
Love people while they’re here.
Take the trip.
Write the book.
Leave the toxic cycle.
Forgive yourself.
Trust life more.
And if something is consistently unreal, draining, manipulative, soul-crushing, or fake?
Tell it to f off now.
Not on your deathbed.
Now.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re ready to start living your REAL life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you start building flow for yourself.
Trust: A Manual for Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace is a book about learning to return to your realness by cultivating trust in yourself and trust in life.
It contains practical exercises and dedicated meditations (Transformational Bridges) to take you DEEP in knowing yourself and life.
This book will answer many of the questions you have growing REAL and flowing towards wholeness. It covers everything from shame to addiction to the unconscious mind and synchronicity (and way more).
Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness is a book designed to help you look at your life from the inside-out so that you can stop holding yourself back and go get what you really want.
It contains 166 practical ‘Revolutions’ for awareness and over 8,000 Self-Guidance Questions for you to uncover new insight about yourself, the world, and reality that you can translate into action and start building your real life on the realest possible foundation.
Shadow Life is an exploration of the human shadow and the hidden side of our personalities. It looks at the masks we wear, where these masks come from, and how we can take them off.
The book explores how we can better manage our relationships with shame, guilt, and trauma in order to remove the Mask that the world has asked us to wear (and that we forgot we were wearing) so we can live an authentic life with less drama, chaos, or BS whilst we’re still around.
The Flow Builder Journal has everything you need to make the next 21-weeks of your life a turning point.
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